35 
Farm Notes. 
Nebraska where the rows were but fourteen inches apart. 
Many experiments have shown that a sugar beet to do its 
best needs one square foot of ground. If then the rows 
could be made twelve inches apart and the beets thinned to 
twelve inches in the row we should have the largest possible 
crop per acre of the highest sugar and purity. 
Where the beets are raised by irrigation the rows must 
be far enough apart to allow an irrigating furrow to be run 
between. It will not do to allow the water to run against 
the beet itself, because it injures the crown of the beet and 
lowers the sugar and purity. The water must be kept in the 
furrows and the sides of the furrow made high enough to 
carry the water over any small irregularities in the surface, 
the water soaking sideways through the ground to the beet. 
If the surface of the land was an absolute plane, a furrow 
three or four inches deep would be an abundance and such a 
furrow could be made in rows eighteen inches apart. In 
our tests on the College farm we have grown many fields of 
beets successfully in eighteen inch rows where the land was 
in the best possible condition. But where the land is not 
properly smoothed, an eighteen inch space in not enough to 
throw up a furrow high and deep enough to keep the water 
off the beets. Under most conditions, with gently sloping 
or nearly flat ground and long rows, twenty-four inches 
apart is none too much for ease in irrigating. The twenty- 
four inch row will not raise so large a crop per acre as the 
eighteen inch row. 
Aset of experiments was made to determine whether it 
is possible to get the benefit of the large space for furrow¬ 
ing and irrigating while at the same time obtaining as large 
a crop as would be gotten from rows close together. The 
rows were planted alternately eleven and twenty-seven 
inches apart. All the irrigating was done in the twenty- 
seven inch space, while the beets on the two sides of the 
eleven inch space were so near together that after the thin¬ 
ning and the first hoeing, they shaded this small space and 
it required no further attention. The two rows together oc¬ 
cupied thirty-eight inches, an average of nineteen inches 
per row. These plots were planted side by side with those 
in which all the rows were twenty-four inches apart and 
which were irrigated between each row. This second 
method, and also the method of eighteen inch rows, require 
twice as many irrigating furrows as the twenty-seven and 
eleven inch furrows. 
